Since I play like a powermad lunatic with a preference for Greek culture, I ruler deisgned myself a legitmately powermad lunatic. Bastard son of Morosini, Venetian patrician with the trade post in Byz territory, named Basilio (feeds the delusions of grandeur), raised Greek by his jilted mother. Turns 16, goes to Venice, kidnaps his half brothers and sister to force his father to publicly legitimize him. Then impales the father who rejected him and slits the kids' throats in front of him as he dies slowly. Blames it on the voices at his trial. That, fearsome diplomacy skill, bribes (from a loan from his mother's brother), and the chance for them to rip apart Morosini trade holdings run by a posessed lunatic combine to convince the Doge and 3 patricians to release me to head house Morosini. A small gift of gold and a letter of profound repentence convinced the Pope to lift the excommunication. Only Ziani saw thru it all and is my rival family to this day. So a cruel excommunicated possessed lunatic legitimized bastard with a reputation for impaling relatives took the reins at age 16. At 60 he's leading an army of mercs in an invasion of Byzantium to finally make himself Basileus like Mother named him. Against his daughter in law whom he demanded become Catholic. After murdering her sister and deposing her niece in order to put his daughter in law on the throne in the first place. Crazy, they said. Common lowborn bastard, they said. Mother said I was her little Basileus. Mother *will* be right! And after me, Porphyrios will press his wife's weak claim to the HRE and reunify the glory that was Rome. The heirs to France do not carry the name Morosini, but they are my grandsons and wards all the same, and will bring Gallia back to the purple in time.
Other than his bloody beginnings and the brutal path to the ERE throne, the worst this character has done was to his longsuffering chancellor. I arranged his marriage, took his genius wife as lover, she convinced him the boy was his, and I replaced him with my horse. Three times. I took the boy as ward after both his (ahem) parents died of natural causes, and set him up with a city when he came of age. I may be known as the Wicked, but I'm not such a bad guy really.